Chapter 8: The Valley of Horns and Blood
Soma stepped out from the cool darkness of the cave into the unchanging daylight.
"How many hours have gone by?" he wondered aloud.
Above him, the two suns hung in the sky, fixed and unmoving, as though nailed to the heavens. No shadows shifted. No time passed. The world itself felt frozen in a state of eternal day.
His gaze snagged on something strange. A huge boulder loomed above the cave's entrance, balanced at an angle that seemed deliberate. He narrowed his eyes. Its shape was wrong—too sharp, too purposeful.
He leapt, throwing a small stone behind him to propel his body upward. Gravity bent to his strange soul-form, carrying him to the ledge. He landed with a grace he never would've managed on Earth.
Up close, the boulder revealed itself: a massive arrow, crudely carved but unmistakable. It pointed north.
"It's like… someone's telling me to follow."
A sharp surge of hope stabbed through his chest. An intelligent being lives here. Someone who could help me escape this world.
But instinct warned him not to rush blindly. He marked the cave as his point of return. Using a sharp rock, he etched a rough diagram on the boulder's face: the twin suns above marked East, his left hand West, the arrow North, and behind him South. His spawn point.
Satisfied, he gathered a handful of stones and launched himself into the sky. Each rock hurled backward propelled him forward, turning his body into a living projectile.
The world below blurred into a vivid tapestry. Grasslands rolled like emerald seas. Forests burned with impossible colors—violet leaves, orange trunks, flowers that gleamed faintly under the twin suns.
And life moved everywhere.
He saw a herd of rabbits bounding through the plains, their bodies small and nimble—yet from their heads grew antlers like miniature stags, branching into delicate crowns.
Above, vultures wheeled in the stale sky. But each had two heads, their necks twisting independently, beaks snapping at each other even as they circled in search of carrion.
In the distance, a herd of Armored Bulls grazed on a grassy slope, towering nearly twelve feet at the shoulder. Their massive frames gleamed like hammered bronze, ridged with plates that looked forged rather than grown. Spines jutted along their backs like jagged towers, and their horns curled forward, black and heavy, designed to crush stone. Yet for all their warlike appearance, they lowered their heads not in fury but in calm rhythm, chewing on thick swathes of alien grass. The ground trembled gently beneath their weight as they moved, peaceful titans of flesh and armor.
Not all the sights were of life. Twice, Soma descended when he spotted faint souls rising from fresh carnage. A deer-like creature torn to ribbons. A serpent cracked in half, its blood steaming into the soil. He caught their pale lights as they drifted upward, drawing them into his ghostly chest.
He didn't know why he did it. He didn't even understand how. But it felt right. The souls slid into him like cold water, filling cracks he hadn't known were there. Each one burned, then softened into silence, leaving behind a faint hum. He almost welcomed it. Almost.
Days—or what felt like days—passed as he traveled north. From time to time, he descended to gather more stones, careful never to let his supply run dry.
And then, the valley opened before him.
Two mountains rose like titans, their jagged peaks tearing at the sky. Between them lay a vast grassland carved by a river so clear it glittered like a vein of liquid glass. Along the water's edge grew colossal trees, their roots coiling like serpents, their crowns wide enough to shade entire villages. The air was heavy here, thick with the musk of beasts. A faint metallic tang of old blood drifted with the wind.
Soma hovered, awestruck. It's… beautiful.
The thought had barely formed when a sound shattered it.
A growl. Deep. Monstrous. It wasn't just heard—it was felt, a vibration that rattled his bones, as though the valley itself had roared in pain.
Soma turned his head.
What he saw froze him in place.
On the grassland below, a nightmare battle was already underway.
The predators came first into focus: horned tigers. Massive, hulking like war machines draped in flesh, their striped hides glowed faintly as though lit from beneath, every ripple of muscle shimmering with savage intent. Twin horns jutted from their skulls, spiraling black and sharp enough to pierce stone. Saliva poured from their jaws in long ropes, dripping onto the grass where it hissed, eating into the earth. Their eyes glowed yellow, feral lanterns in the eternal dusk. When they roared, the sound was not just noise—it was impact, hammering through Soma's chest like a physical blow.
Their prey was worse.
A Bloodmaw Colossus stood against them, colossal and terrible. Its body rippled with striped muscle, swollen beyond natural design. Its shoulders hunched beneath jagged plates of bone, its back arched like a living fortress. Two great horns curled from its skull, blackened and scarred, etched by countless battles. Beneath them, its eyes burned like molten coal. And when its jaws opened, the horror revealed itself: behind the first row of fangs lay a second row of saw-like teeth, grinding endlessly like millstones. Every breath it exhaled boiled out in a furnace-hot growl, stirring the grass like a storm wind. When it roared, the valley trembled. Birds erupted from the canopy, and even the mountains seemed to flinch.
The valley became an arena.
The horned tigers circled with ritual precision. They lunged one at a time, carving trenches into the Bloodmaw Colossus' hide. Flesh tore. Blood gushed in thick rivers, splattering the grass with crimson mist. The stench of iron filled the air, sharp and choking.
From the slope, the Armored Bulls bellowed and stampeded away, their bronze plates clashing like war drums. Trees shook from their thunderous retreat, dust rising as they vanished over the ridge. Even herbivores knew to flee this blood-soaked theater.
And then another predator joined.
A lithe shape streaked from the riverside, drawn by the reek of blood—sleek, scaled, feline in form but draconic in bearing. Its body shimmered with spined ridges, its claws scythe-long, its maw packed with serrated fangs. This leopard-like draconic beast moved like lightning, darting between the Colossus' legs, raking deep wounds across its belly. Its roar was a high-pitched shriek, like tearing steel, that cut across the Colossus' bellow.
The fight turned savage.
One horned tiger clamped its jaws on the Colossus' foreleg. Muscle tore like wet rope, tendons snapping with the sound of bowstrings. Another leapt onto its back, horns plunging deep, tearing through layers of hide. The Colossus spun, thrashing, its bulk slamming a horn tiger into trees. Bark shattered. Birds scattered in panicked clouds. The ground shook with each violent impact.
The draconic beast slashed upward, claws carving across the Colossus' throat. Blood fountained skyward, spraying over the beasts in hot arcs. The Colossus snapped its head down, jaws catching the beast's tail. With a brutal jerk, it swung the creature into the river. Water exploded, turned instantly red as the beast's blood spread downstream like a vein of spilled paint.
Yet something else disturbed Soma more. The Colossus' belly… it twitched. Too much. Even for wounds so deep, its gut seemed to pulse, like something alive thrashed inside. The sight chilled him, though he couldn't name why.
A tiger was hurled into the air, but not before its claws had opened the Colossus' belly. For a heartbeat, the world seemed to still. The behemoth staggered, knees buckling. Its furnace breath grew ragged. Its massive chest heaved once, twice—then it toppled forward in a quake that split the grassland. With a final, bone-shaking crash, the titan's bulk came down directly on the leopard-like draconic beast, burying it beneath tons of flesh and shattered bone. For a moment, it seemed the predator had been erased, its body lost beneath the corpse. But the truth was worse—because something else was already moving inside that fallen carcass.
And then the dread bloomed into reality.
The Colossus' chest bulged. Its ribs creaked outward with wet snaps. The belly pulsed again—then split.
With a tearing sound, a draconic beast burst from its cavity, slick with gore, its scales shining crimson in the blood. Then another. And another. Parasite-born, they crawled from its body in a nightmarish procession, tearing through organs, dragging loops of intestine with them as they emerged. One gnawed at the Colossus' heart before wrenching free. Another pulled itself out by the spine, the bone cracking as it used it like a ladder.
The carcass became a nest.
The horned tigers wasted no time. They descended like hungry demons, ripping into the Colossus' remains even as the newborn beasts shrieked, their bodies steaming with gore.
The sound was unbearable—wet tearing, bones snapping like branches, the squelch of flesh devoured too fast. The air vibrated with the buzzing of flies, already thick around the steaming gore. The grass beneath the Colossus became a swamp of blood, mud, and shreds of skin.
Soma's hand twitched at his side. Revulsion coiled in his stomach. Yet another part of him, colder, watched with an alien calm, as though the horror were something he was meant to see.
But his eyes fixed on what rose from the Colossus' ruined shell.
A soul.
It emerged as pale fire, the size of a man's head, glowing with cold brilliance. It pulsed as if alive, bending the air around it. Slowly it rose, as though reluctant to leave.
Soma reached without thinking. His hand closed around the light.
The soul sank into his chest.
A surge ripped through him—cold, vast, endless. His vision blurred. His breath caught. For an instant it felt as though the valley itself had entered him, every scream, every drop of blood, every death. His body shook, hollow and full all at once.
When it passed, he was left gasping, staring down at the field of bones and blood.
The horned tigers had already dragged the carcass into ruin, entrails strewn across the grass. Vultures with twin heads descended, squabbling, their hooked beaks tearing strips of intestine and ragged flesh that had fallen free onto the ground, careful never to approach the feeding tigers themselves.
Soma ignored them. His focus was elsewhere—on the deep, throbbing ache in his throwing arm. It felt as though someone had hammered the bone for hours.
Exhaustion dragged at him. He drifted toward the base of one of the mountains and sank into the shade of a colossal tree. Its bark was black and ridged like the plates of some enormous insect, and its leaves were jagged blades that hummed faintly, almost like whispers, as the wind passed through.
Leaning against the trunk, he finally allowed himself to breathe. His body—if it could still be called that—shook with the memory of exertion.
He began to calculate.
His height: five and a half feet.
The length of each throw: seventy times his body.
He frowned, tracing the numbers into the dirt with his fingertip. So… one stone propelled him nearly a hundred meters.
Five hundred throws.
At nearly a hundred meters each.
Almost fifty kilometers.
A weary smile tugged at his lips. "Not bad… for a ghost."
But pride faded quickly into fatigue. His body screamed for rest. He pressed his shoulder into the alien bark, the hum of the tree vibrating faintly through his bones. His eyelids grew heavy.
And still, as he closed his eyes, a thought coiled through his mind:
In this world, even rest might come at a cost.